NVIDIA looks to strengthen its position in the mobile sectors with Tegra 4

With smartphones and tablets taking over the computing world and putting traditional PCs and notebooks on the back burner, a number of companies are jockeying for position to deliver the highest performing SOCs on the market. NVIDIA has been in this game for a while with its Tegra line of processors, and its most recent Tegra 3 has scored a slew of design wins over the past year.

NVIDIA is looking to build upon that success with its next generation Tegra 4. While we're sure that NVIDIA was looking to surprise everyone at CES, most of the details on the new chip leaked in mid-December. The Cortex-A15-based Tegra 4 is built on a 28nm process, continues the 4+1 design (quad-core + companion core), and features 72 NVIDIA GeForce GPU cores.

NVIDIA says that the move to 28nm help the Tegra 4 consumer 45 percent less power than its predecessor and would allow mainstream phones to deliver 14 hours of continues HD video content.

However, Tegra 4 doesn't have integrated LTE onboard. Instead, NVIDIA is hyping up its optional Icera i500 processor for LTE functionality. Although the move to 28nm is likely to improve battery life across the board, not having LTE integrated on-chip isn't going to do it any favors either.

We’re likely to see a number of Tegra 4-based products at CES, and we’ll be sure to keep you informed of the ones that really catch our eye.

Aside from Apple there's also Qualcomm that NVIDIA is playing catch-up with. I'm looking forward to benchmarks by Anandtech, but given the pattern of the last few years at best I expect it to just barely catch up with what there is now, only to be leapfrogged shortly by Apple and Qualcomm.